Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic

(1)

(2)

(3)

LITERATURE AND SOCIETY: The Function of Literary Sociology in Comparative Literature (co-edited with Bart Keunen)

POST EX SUB DIS: Urban Fragmentations and Constructions (co-edited with the Ghent Urban Studies Team)

THE URBAN CONDITION: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis (co-authored and co-edited with the Ghent Urban Studies Team)

WALLACE STEVENS AND THE LIMITS OF READING AND WRITING

Also available by Edward Ragg

(4)

Wallace Stevens across

the Atlantic

Edited by

Bart Eeckhout and

Edward Ragg

With a Preface by Frank Kermode

(5)

Individual chapters © the contributors 2008 Preface © Frank Kermode 2008

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

Companies and representatives throughout the world

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan®_{is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom} and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.

ISBN-13: 978--0--230--53584--8 hardback ISBN-10: 0--230--53584--4 hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic : edited by Bart Eeckhout & Edward Ragg.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-53584-4 (alk. paper)

1. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Criticism and interpretation. 2. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Appreciation Europe. 3. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Appreciation Europe. 4. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Influence. 5. Modernism (Literature) I. Eeckhout, Bart, 1964 II. Ragg, Edward, 1976

PS3537.T4753Z8735 2008 811’.52 dc22

2008015882

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

(6)

List of Illustrations

(Plate section falls between pages 230 and 231 and reproduces images from the artist’s bookOde to the Colossal Suncreated by Helga Kos)

1 Volume 1. Title page

(printed on an advanced duplicator)

2 Volume 1. Above: Prelude part with CD of ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’.

Below: detail

(printed on an advanced duplicator)

3 Volume 1. Above: ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’. Below: detail

(linoleum prints with screen-printed main text)

4 Volume 2. Above: opened at ‘A Child Asleep in Its Own Life’ and

Volume 3 opened at ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’. Below: Volume 2 opened at ‘The Dove in Spring’ and Volume 3 opened at ‘Of Mere Being’ (mixed printing techniques)

5 Volume 3. Above: ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’. Below: detail

(mixed printing techniques)

6 Volume 2. Above: ‘The Planet on the Table’. Below: detail

(printed in off-set from hand-painted plates)

7 Volume 3. ‘Of Mere Being’

(laser prints in combination with screen print)

(9)

Notes on Contributors

Charles Altieri, Stageberg Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, is the author of ten books, includingSelf and Sensibility in Contempo-rary American Poetry(Cambridge University Press, 1984),Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Canons and Consequences (Northwestern University Press, 1990), Postmodernisms

Now(Penn State University Press, 1998),The Particulars of Rapture (Cornell

University Press, 2003) andThe Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Mod-ernism and After(Blackwell, 2006).

Massimo Bacigalupo, Professor of American Literature and of Literary Trans-lation, University of Genoa, is the author ofThe Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (Columbia University Press, 1980) and Grotta Byron (Cam-panotto, 2001), and an award-winning translator of Stevens, Pound and Wordsworth, among others. He contributed a paper on ‘The Mediterranean

in Pound, Yeats, and Stevens’ toAnglo-American Modernity and the

Mediter-ranean, ed. Caroline Patey et al. (Università di Milano, 2006).

Josh Cohenis Reader in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is the author ofSpectacular Allegories: Post-modern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing(Pluto, 1998), Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy(Continuum, 2003) andHow to Read Freud (Granta, 2005). In July 2004 he organized a symposium on Stevens at the University of London.

Bart Eeckhoutis Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Antwerp. He is the author ofWallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (University of Missouri Press, 2002) and has guest-edited two special issues ofThe Wallace Stevens Journal(Fall 2001 and, with Edward Ragg, Spring 2006), of which he is also an editorial board member. He is a translator of Stevens into Dutch and, with Edward Ragg, co-organized the international conference ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe’ (Rothermere American Institute, August 2005).

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College London. He has published widely on British, French and American poetry. His publications

include Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Faber, 2000; Cornell

University Press, 2001), A Driftwood Altar: Reviews and Essays (Waywiser,

2005), and two collections of poetry, Landlocked(Chatto & Windus, 1992,

rpt 1998) andSoft Sift(Faber, 2001; Harcourt Brace, 2003).

(10)

Lisa Goldfarbis the Associate Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, and a member of the full-time faculty. She is the author of many articles on Stevens and Valéry (The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Romanic Reviewand theJournal of Modern Literature) and is completing a book entitled‘The Figure Concealed’: Valéryan Music in the Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens. She is also preparing an international conference on Stevens in New York.

David Haglundis completing a DPhil on Stevens at Balliol College, Oxford University. He has taught at Harvard and Hunter College as well as Oxford,

and has published articles and reviews in theLondon Review of Books,Essays

in Criticism,PN Review,Slatemagazine and elsewhere.

Frank Kermodeis the author/editor of some forty volumes and one of the most distinguished critics of our time. In the world of Stevens criticism he is well-known as one of the poet’s earliest champions in Europe, witness his

introductory monographWallace Stevens(Faber, 1960, rpt 1989), and as joint

editor (with Joan Richardson) of Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose

(Library of America, 1997).

Helga Kos is a visual artist from Amsterdam. She spent five years (1998– 2003) working on a hand-printed artist’s book,Ode to the Colossal Sun, which was inspired by Ned Rorem’s 1972 song cycle ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’. The book has been exhibited internationally, including displays in Montreal, Buffalo, Leipzig, Paris and Oxford, and was short-listed for the award of ‘Best Book Designs from All Over the World’.

George Lensing, Mann Family Distinguished Professor of English, University of North Carolina, is the author ofWallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth(Louisiana

State University Press, 1986) andWallace Stevens and the Seasons(Louisiana

State University Press, 2001). He is on the editorial board of The Wallace

Stevens Journal, for which he also serves as book review editor.

J. Hillis Milleris Research Professor at the University of California, Irvine and one of the most influential literary scholars of our time. He holds various hon-orary degrees and is past president of the Modern Language Association of America. Among his long-standing research interests is the poetry of Stevens,

about which he has published for more than four decades, fromPoets of

Real-ity (Harvard University Press, 1965) over The Linguistic Moment(Princeton

University Press, 1985) toTopographies(Stanford University Press, 1995) and

(11)

Justin Quinn, educated at Trinity College Dublin, is Associate Professor

at the Charles University of Prague. He is the author of Gathered Beneath

the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community (University College Dublin Press, 2002), besides being a poet and poetry translator from the

Czech. He is at work on The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry,

1800–2000.

Edward Raggcompleted his doctorate on Stevens at Cambridge University in 2005 and teaches at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has published several articles inThe Wallace Stevens Journaland is completing a book entitledThe Question of Abstraction: Wallace Stevens’ Poetry and Prose. With Bart Eeckhout he co-organized the international conference ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe’ (Rothermere American Institute, August 2005); and subsequently

guest-edited a special issue ofThe Wallace Stevens Journal(Spring 2006). He

has published poetry in Carcanet’sNew Poetries IVanthology as well as inPN

Review,Agenda,Critical Quarterlyand other international magazines.

Irene Ramalho Santos, Professor of English and American Studies, University of Coimbra, and International Affiliate, Department of Compar-ative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of several articles on American poetry (including many on Stevens) and ofAtlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism(University Press of New England, 2003; Brazilian edition, Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2007; Portuguese edition, Porto: Afrontamento, 2008).

Gareth Reeves, Reader in English, Durham University, is the author of two books on Eliot,T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet(Macmillan, 1989) andT. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’(Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), ofAuden, MacNeice, Spender

(Macmillan, 1992; with Michael O’Neill), of two volumes of poetry,Real

Sto-ries(Carcanet, 1984) andListening In(Carcanet, 1993), and of many essays

on twentienth-century English, Irish and American poetry.

Robert Rehder, Chair of English and American Literature, University of

Fribourg, Switzerland; is the author of Stevens, Williams, Crane and the

Motive for Metaphor(Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

(Macmillan, 1998) andWordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry(Croom

Helm, 1981). He is also a poet and has publishedThe Compromises Will Be

Different(Carcanet, 1995). He has published two books of poetry,The Com-promise Will Be Different (Carcanet, 1995) andFirst Things When(Carcanet, 2009).

(12)

Acknowledgements

The roots of the present collaboration stretch back some three years, when we organized what was arguably the first major European conference on Wallace

Stevens, entitledFifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe(August 2005). We

remain deeply grateful to Paul Giles and the staff of The Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, for hosting and sponsoring the intellectually energizing conference that brought several of the authors assembled here together for the first time. What follows, however, are not the published proceedings of that conference, but predominantly new essays that grew, in part, out of the debate initiated at The Rothermere.

Following that event, we were fortunate to publish a number of papers,

based on conference presentations, both in The Wallace Stevens

Jour-nal and PN Review (publications that aptly symbolized the Transatlantic nature of our and our authors’ work). We are much indebted to John N.

Serio, who invited us to guest-edit the Spring 2006 issue of The Wallace

Stevens Journalon ‘Stevens and British Literature’, and to Michael Schmidt, who published three other significant papers derived from the Oxford

event in PN Review 169 (May–June 2006). Specifically, we would like to

acknowledge the publication of early versions of the essays here by David

Haglund and Gareth Reeves in PN Review and The Wallace Stevens Journal

respectively.

Further thanks are due to the University Foundation of Belgium for its financial support and its double peer review of the manuscript. The pub-lication grant we have received from the University Foundation has made a significant difference to the appearance of the book, both in enabling us to include illustrations from Helga Kos’s artist’s book and in supporting the reproduction on the cover of Tom King’s early design for our conference poster. Bringing the colour design from Tom King’s Mondrian-inspired depic-tions of Stevens to this project provides a fitting graphic emblem for what we attempt to do here, while Helga Kos’s ingenuity, lovingly reported in the coda to our book, is given added weight by the images accompanying her essay.

We are most happy to thank also our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy, Christabel Scaife, Steven Hall and Penny Simmons, for their per-sistent help, encouragement and exemplary guidance. Publishing a volume of essays featuring a broad range of international contributors has its own rewards and challenges; and we are particularly appreciative of the exacting criticism and author care we have received. This includes the two anonymous referees who at different stages in the book’s composition process supported our project and provided invaluable feedback.

(13)

(14)

List of Abbreviations

The following abbreviations for the works of Wallace Stevens are used throughout. As a rule, references to poems and prose are to the Library of America edition edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (abbreviated asCPP). References to earlier editions appear only sparingly for text-intrinsic reasons. Page references are provided for individual poems in the main text only where those poems are discussed in some detail.

CP The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954.

CPP Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.

CS The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie. Ed. J. Donald Blount. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.

FPof P ‘From Pieces of Paper’. In George S. Lensing,Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. 166–200.

L Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966; rpt Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

OP 1957 Opus Posthumous. Ed. Samuel French Morse. New York: Knopf, 1957.

OP Opus Posthumous. Revised edition. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf, 1989.

SP Holly Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace

Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977.

SPBS Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujets: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book. A Facsimile and Transcription. Ed. Milton J. Bates. Stanford: Stanford University Press and Huntington Library, 1989.

(15)

(16)

Preface

Frank Kermode

Since this rich volume is concerned with the impact of Wallace Stevens on Europe, and of Europe on Wallace Stevens, I hope it may be allowed as rele-vant rather than condemned as immodest of me to claim that I introduced the Swiss to Stevens at some date around 1958–60. I had recently made a programme for the BBC, a reading with commentary of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’. The reader was Anthony Jacobs, the best in the business, and we did several such programmes together. It is hard to believe that the BBC would nowadays dream of allowing such highbrow performances. Audi-ences below 50,000 could not be assessed, so we could, if we chose, pretend to believe that there was a silent audience of around 49,000 Stevens enthusi-asts. A few hundred would probably be nearer the truth. Many such wickedly élite programmes were made in those profligate years.

Invited to address a literature seminar in Zurich, I asked if I might speak about Stevens and especially about ‘Notes’. My host, Professor Heinrich Strau-mann, who as a young professor had delivered the University’s oration at James Joyce’s funeral in Zurich, had not heard, or had heard very little, of Stevens, but he was adventurous and encouraged me to go ahead. I took the tapes of the broadcast with me. The students greatly enjoyed the reading, and I still remember the laugh that followed the lines

...a kind of Swiss perfection comes And a familiar music of the machine Sets up its Schwärmerei...

(CPP334)

I suppose they have subsequently found out more about Stevens’ idea of Switzerland. Back in London, despite encouragement from the likes of Julian Symons and Nicholas Moore (on whom Mark Ford writes so engagingly in Chapter 11 below) the reputation of Stevens was maturing slowly. There was some opposition; Larkin, increasingly influential himself, thought Stevens ‘not worth mentioning’. Stevens’ admirers were not numerous, but they were devoted and various. My friend John Wain, who as a ‘Movement’ poet and a friend of Larkin might have been expected to have little time for this alien Modernist, knew many poems of Stevens’ by heart. I remember sitting with him in a Reading pub on the day we read of the poet’s death, and being touched by the depth of his grief.

That was in 1955, only two years after Faber at last published theSelected Poems. That book remains in print, unlike most of Stevens’ books. There was a

(17)

rumour that Eliot was lukewarm about Stevens; this is now said, though with-out certainty, to be untrue, but it is certain that his firm has never been very willing to keep Stevens’ other books in print. TheSelecteddoesn’t offer a full view of the poet (imagine Stevens without ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ and ‘The Rock’) but for reasons unknown to me Holly Stevens’ much richer selection,The Palm at the End of the Mind, has never been published in

Eng-land, and most readers, unless they can afford theCollectedand the updated

Opus Posthumous, are presumably still stuck with the fifty-odd-year-old and inadequateSelected.

In some respects his work has been more cordially received on the Con-tinent, as Massimo Bacigalupo testifies below (another Italian Stevensian, Nadia Fusini, has provided challenging annotated translations in book-form of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ andThe Auroras of Autumn). I have a copy of a thesis on Stevens submitted for a doctorate at the University of Cracow in 1971, and no doubt many such essays were written, even in Eastern Europe, even at that time.

Most of my own Stevens collection, which I liked to think probably among the best in England, was destroyed in an accident as I was moving house; but by a happy minor accident inside the greater one my copy of the Alcestis Press Ideas of Ordersurvived the ordeal, though not in mint condition. Probably it was, perhaps it is, the only example in England. It was Stevens’ own signed copy, given to me long ago by Holly Stevens. I am wondering who I should leave it to.

Much of Stevens’ poetry derives from a continuing philosophical reverie, which is what he must have had in mind when he spoke of ‘tentative ideas for the purposes of poetry’ (a phrase that, as one may seeinfra, caught the eye of David Haglund) and it is not surprising that critics are sometimes tempted to approach him obliquely, via another philosopher. Here we are told of a poem that may be read ‘through Blanchot’, and another to be read ‘through Husserl’. Santayana is of course an important presence, and so is Nietzsche, but one ought to consider what may be lost if Stevens is ‘read’ through them. Moreover, Stevens’ reading of philosophy was scant and essentially dilet-tante. For example, he omitted the very simple inquiry that would have informed him whether Heidegger lectured in French or German. In fact, his relationship with Heidegger is still almost as mysterious to me as it was when I tried to sort it out in 1980. I am grateful, therefore, to Charles Altieri and Krzysztof Ziarek for their further elucidations of such philosophical relation-ships in that, unlike some other commentators, they resist the temptation to present the poet as primarily an abstruse philosopher.

(18)

kind of writer. His meditations bear something of the same relation to formal philosophy that his Europe bears to the real continent – a topic valuably explored in this collection by George Lensing and Robert Rehder.

It does seem, as his daughter Holly remarked, that the poet came to prefer a Europe of his own construction to the real thing. And he seems always to have been convinced that America, and American poetry, had best be distinguished, or isolated, from other anglophone poetic dialects, even from the Irish, though I think he loved Ireland more than England. His epistolary friend Thomas McGreevy, wounded on the Somme in the British cause, was a Catholic Modernist who returned to Ireland from the France of Joyce and Beckett, and the London of T. S. Eliot, and spent his life among the pictures of the Dublin National Gallery – the sort of man Stevens might admire not only for his verses or for the paintings in his charge but for his idiosyncratic style, his individual relationship to Catholic philosophy and to Irish nationalism. I think Stevens had no comparable English friend.

(19)

(20)

Introduction: The Lights of

Norway and All That

Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg

A long time you have been making the trip From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil, Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.

‘Of Hartford in a Purple Light’

To situate the quintessential Modernist poet Wallace Stevens ‘across the Atlantic’, where the lights of Norway mysteriously travel, is to place him in a realm that is at once dynamic and open-ended. Our primary aim in putting together this book is to reconsider Stevens’ development as he responds to intermingling influences from two different continents. In particular, we want to explore the nature of a poetics that may be called ‘Transatlantic’ because it is neither precisely American nor European, but involves a larger complex of literary, artistic and cultural qualities. Indeed, Stevens’ poetry, as we see it, threatens to disappear from view when discussed in simple oppositional terms of its ‘American’ qualities or its assimilations and trans-formations of ‘European’ subject-matter. In the language of Stevens’ own lecture ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’, such amorphous notions as the ‘European’ and the ‘American’ are ultimately ‘too general to be serviceable’

(CPP 781). If either of these terms is to be rehabilitated in Stevens

criti-cism, then it had better be in the reconstructed sense in which millions of Americans have implicitly defined themselves as ‘Transatlantic’: through preserving immigrant narratives, tracing genealogy (as Stevens did with his Dutch and German ancestry) or jostling different federal and state identities which seek to adapt European inheritances on American soil.

When we present ‘Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic’, then (without a

qualifying subtitle), we intend to honour the dynamic travel in both direc-tions implied in our title. To our more metaphoric purpose here the Atlantic

Ocean serves as a magnetic, mutually enriching and defininghorizonfor the

cultures that have developed on either side of its expanse. It is meant to pro-vide perspective. Moreover, oceans actively invitecrossing: a notion which we would like to deploy in its full complexity. As with the ‘Twenty men crossing

(21)

a bridge / Into a village’ in Stevens’ early poem ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’ (CPP15–16), we should understand the word not only in its literal, physical sense but as a reference also to language’s capacities to trope and translate (see Cook 177 and Maeder 49–51). Something similar applies to the word ‘Atlantic’, which is ultimately no more than a conventional name for a real-ity in permanent flux. Any attempt at linguistically demarcating so fluid an entity inevitably engages in what Stevens called, in a poem that will be among the most frequently cited in this book, ‘Description Without Place’.

If many another American author could be described as ‘Transatlantic’ in the sense suggested, Stevens is nevertheless a special case; and not merely because this poet did not travel abroad extensively (visiting only Canada, Cuba and parts of the Gulf of Mexico). Far more significant is the extent to which Stevens made a point ofnottravelling. In some sense, his was the ‘stay-at-home’ mentality of Henry David Thoreau – albeit with greater ambivalence toward the ‘transcendental’ and with a modern stance obviously shaped by the international politics of his particular epoch. Yet Stevens was also uncom-fortable following Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and, in his own era, William Carlos Williams in writing in a self-consciously American grain. His work is hardly ever nativist in the sense Walter Benn Michaels has explored in his influential studyOur America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Paradoxi-cally, this remains the case even with the late poetry and prose which appeals more overtly to place, particularly to Connecticut.

But neither was Stevens an American writer who happened to mine European art and literature and then turn his findings into something else again – something ‘homegrown’. With him the situation was more ‘com-plex’, in the etymological sense of that word: more entwined and folded over. He was a poet who constantly explored American and European artistic productions in order to find a voice which would be intrinsically satisfy-ing outside and beyond immediate national contexts. Modulatsatisfy-ing upon his

famous aphorism that ‘French and English constitute a single language’ (CPP

914), we might say that to Stevens Europe and America constituted a sin-gle culture, at least from the imaginative vantage of his home in Hartford, Connecticut.

We might also remind ourselves of the trouble Stevens had in character-izing his American experience. His natural points of artistic reference were largely French as were the majority of the paintings he bought. His book collecting and correspondence took him considerably outside an American context as well; and his literary influences were an eclectic mix drawing on French Symbolism, British Romanticism and the American Renaissance. Time and again, the correspondence reveals Stevens both constructing and failing to realize what it means to be ‘American’ as well as what it might mean to be ‘French’, ‘Irish’ or ‘Cuban’. As he wrote to his epistolary poet-friend in

Ireland, Thomas McGreevy: ‘One is so homeless over here...and something

(22)

for the first time’ (L626). To a poet so concerned with place and genealogy, this searching after a fleeting, provisional sense of identity – as well as the idea of living in a creative atmosphere composed out of words – became a persistent preoccupation.

The effect of this preoccupation on his poetic output is plain for all to see. Any reader coming to Stevens’ work for the first time – without any advance knowledge of the poet’s life – might suppose him to have been an experienced international traveller: one of those Americanfin-de-siècleor Modernist émi-grés who spent considerable time in Paris and elsewhere on the European continent, like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein or Hart Crane. Stevens’ poetry is chock-full of references to European places. By name, it takes us on a trip through a range of European countries: England and France, clearly, but also Ireland, Switzerland, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Poland and Bulgaria. Even Belgian grapes are mentioned – as a form of ‘fat pastiche’ (CPP124). Within these countries, moreover, countless names of cities are dropped: not merely Paris, but other French places such as Fontainebleau, Aix, Arras, Le Havre, Avignon or Bordeaux. In Switzerland, cities like Geneva, Basel and Zurich are named. On the Italian peninsula we find Florence, Venice, Rome, Bergamo and Naples; in Spain, Madrid, Seville and Segovia; and there are further references to Stockholm, Hamburg, Athens, Vienna, Salzburg and Leyden (but not to Amsterdam, and, in Britain,

little outside London: just ‘the mountainous coiffures of Bath’ [CPP11] and

some ‘Glasgow-frost’ [CPP162]). In the same seemingly slapdash manner,

Stevens’ poetry takes us along European rivers like the Danube, the Rhone, the Moldau or the Tiber. And it betrays a mild obsession with the Alps.

Ever since the 1910s, when Stevens began publishing and being reviewed in the little magazines, critical responses to his work have naturally attended to the poet’s transformation of European influences, particularly French Sym-bolism. But for the Stevens specialist there are interesting lessons to be drawn from scanning the poetry specifically for such European place-names. There is the fact, for example, that the regular appearance of these names largely

post-dates the poet’s first collection,Harmonium(1923). It becomes a staple

of his writings only by the 1930s, at a time when Stevens was finally mak-ing enough money as an insurance lawyer to be able to cross the Atlantic for himself; only to realize that, in all likelihood, he would never do so. That real-ization, and its consequences, is of greater interest than anything else for this book. It means that what we have inherited, in the case of Wallace Stevens, is the singularly powerful literary heritage of a major Modernist poet who spent a large share of his imaginative life ‘in’ or ‘with’ places he had never been to, and ‘in’ or ‘with’ cultures he constructed entirely out of words and images (mostly from paintings and postcards).

(23)

knows this interest to be more than a personal quirk: it allows the poet – in the indirect, self-reflective manner he favoured – to address wider notions of identity as they impact on the personal and cultural existence of every individual. As John Serio explains in his introduction to a special issue ofThe Wallace Stevens Journal devoted to ‘The Poetics of Place’: with Stevens any composition of place becomes ‘the essential exercise in a composition of self’ (4). To Serio the environmental determinism that limits some of the poetic

ideas on place pursued in Harmonium is superseded from the mid-thirties

by a new awareness on the poet’s part: ‘By seeing the relationship between people and place as a distinctively poetic process – “Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right” [CPP913] – he modifies his ideas concerning the relationship with one’s surroundings by translating them into an active, aesthetic mode. Recognizing that “the world about us would be

desolate except for the world within us” [CPP747], he expresses the central

importance of the imagination’s non-geography to the world’s geography’ (ibid.). It is precisely this dynamic interaction between the imagination’s non-geography and Transatlantic ingredients from the world’s non-geography which the current volume sets out to explore at different levels – some biographical and material, others more abstract, indirect or allegorical.

To address a sufficiently diverse range of perspectives in situating Stevens across the Atlantic, we have chosen to divide this book – in somewhat Steven-sian fashion – into three interlinking sections. The first part, ‘Descriptions without Place: Ideas of Europe in Stevens’, looks closely at the different conceptions of Europe (and, in a continually defining dialectic, of Amer-ica) which we find in Stevens’ published writings. Inspired by the tactic of Stevens’ own 1945 poem ‘Description Without Place’, these chapters reflect directly on how Stevens created imaginative projections of the European continent as part of his development as a literary artist. The second, largest section of the volume, ‘Beyond Staten Island: Stevens in Transatlantic Con-versation’, takes its lead from the poet’s own wistful comment that he had ‘never been closer to Europe than Staten Island’ (qtd in Brazeau 201). The types of Transatlantic dialogue covered here are subdivided into philosophi-cal and artistic conversations, bringing together interesting new examples of the kind of comparative studies that are such a powerful staple of Stevens criti-cism. Here Stevens’ poetics and aesthetics are considered as part of an ongoing cross-continental conversation with specific writers and artists. These virtual interlocutors may be philosophers and theorists, visual artists or poets, fig-ures from religious history, or a combination of such. They may serve as identifiable, likely sources of inspiration or else reveal notable affinities that manage to shed new light on the poet’s work.

(24)

title to this section, which includes neither the reflections of a Sorbonne pro-fessor nor any attempt at getting Stevens unappealingly straight. Our focus, rather, is on the instructive cases of two very different British poets (the first establishing a playful and eccentric lineage that died with him, the sec-ond doing his best to downplay and repress Stevens’ influence) as well as one living Portuguese poet for whom ‘affinity’ is a more apposite term than ‘influence’; and, finally, the more palpable afterlife of Stevens’ translation into Italian and French.

* * *

Our first chapter, George Lensing’s ‘ “The Switzerland of the Mind”: Stevens’ Invention of Europe’, opens the volume beautifully by identifying many of the issues affecting the present work. Capitalizing on Lensing’s long-standing experience as a reader of Stevens – particularly his archival work on the poet’s correspondence – Chapter 1 explores Stevens’ changing attitudes to the Euro-pean continent as a poetic and actual notion with reference to the letters, the poet’s working notebooks and significant poems such as ‘The Irish Cliffs of Moher’, ‘The Novel’ and ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’. Lensing establishes how Stevens aimed to ‘bring Europe to himself in intimately personal ways and in ways that would have important consequences for his poetry’.

J. Hillis Miller’s ‘Stevens in Connecticut (and Denmark)’ also witnesses a lifelong reader of Stevens reconsidering his sense of the poet’s overall achievement. Miller blends compelling personal testimonial with incisive close-reading and instructive comparative allusions (to Husserl, Derrida, Plato and Blanchot, among others). Chapter 2 portrays Stevens as a ‘hybrid poet, mixing the indigenous with American culture’s essential Transatlantic legacy’. Contrasting Stevens with the more nativist Williams, Miller analy-ses Stevens’ treatment of American place-names; focusing, in particular, on both a passage from ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ and the rich late poem ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’. The chapter reveals a Stevens who is both indigene stay-at-home and cosmopolitan in his outlook and tastes. Playfully, Miller argues of ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’: ‘This wonderful poem is scarcely intelligible to someone not from Connecticut ...[But it is also] scarcely intelligible to a reader who is not able to place it in the context of European ideas about “the wholly other”, which it obliquely dramatizes’.

(25)

which Rehder deftly explores Stevens’ complex imaginative dialogue with different places, philosophies and descriptive strategies. Indeed, Part I of the book as a whole represents the reclusive poet who spent most of his pro-ductive writing life in the small city of Hartford as arguably one of the first glocalistsof the imagination: a writer who constantly read the global through the local and vice versa, convinced that these two levels are indissociable, only making sense in relation to each other.

Part II, ‘Beyond Staten Island: Stevens in Transatlantic Conversation’, finds Charles Altieri asking what can still be learnt from exploring the complex relationships within Stevens’ work between ideas and words, philosophical reflections and poetic statement. Taking its lead from Edmund Husserl’sCrisis in the European Sciences, Chapter 4 argues that Stevens’ mature poetry involves a meditation on the ‘transcendentalist ego’. More especially, Altieri draws on his own extensive experience in reading Stevens to argue that ‘Husserl’s

capac-ity to blend the transcendental and the elemental ...helps us see what is

philosophically dynamic and engaging about Stevens’ sense of the distinc-tive tasks his poetry had to perform’. The sense of that task is emphasized in Altieri’s analysis by his disagreement with aspects of philosopher Simon Critchley’sThings Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens(2005). Altieri finds Critchley’s ‘model’ of reading to be ‘neither sufficiently rich in its affirmations nor sufficiently dark in its sense of tragedy to be adequate to late Stevens’. His main concern is that ‘Critchley emphasizes the situations the late poems face rather than the situatings the poems afford if we read them as exemplary acts of mind’.

If Stevens criticism has already harnessed phenomenology in a variety of ways, and if Critchley’s study has proved both insightful and contentious, Krzysztof Ziarek adds to Altieri’s Husserlian account by revisiting the shadow of Martin Heidegger in the poet’s late work. Significantly, he also takes issue with the Stevens proposed by Critchley. In Chapter 5, ‘ “Without human meaning”: Stevens, Heidegger and the Foreignness of Poetry’, Ziarek provides a new reading of the late poem ‘Of Mere Being’, glossing both Heideggerian and Stevensian concerns about the limits and extent of the human. The chapter subtly argues: ‘The reality of “mere being” is indeed without human purpose and human meaning; and it becomes disclosed as such through a poietic letting-be, a release from power performed by language’. As Ziarek continues: ‘For what Critchley calls the “simple ‘there is’ of things”...is not there of its own, as it were, prior to the entrance of the imagination: it is in fact the very “minimal” transformation of the imagination that brings forth the “there is” of things.’ To this extent, Altieri’s and Ziarek’s chapters may be read as significant companion pieces.

(26)

Christianity in his later poetry (especiallyTransport to SummerandThe Auroras of Autumn) is signally different from the attitudes to Christian faith encoun-tered in the early work. Dispensing with the Nietzschean gaiety and poetic

‘mockery’ of Christianity inHarmonium, the later poetry makes more robust

references to the influence of Christian doctrine on Western literature. Con-trasting Stevens with Yeats, Quinn finds the American poet meditating on Emperor Constantine in ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ and argues that his preoccupation with ‘saints and sanctity’ enables Stevens to define himself as ‘post-Christian’. Rather than distance himself in the very act of

addressing what the earlyHarmoniumpoem calls ‘A High-Toned Old Christian

Woman’, Quinn claims that Stevens explores Christian icons and iconogra-phy in greater depth precisely to characterize his own post-Christian poetic experience.

Josh Cohen in Chapter 7, ‘ “The strange unlike”: Stevens’ Poetics of Resemblance’, returns Stevens to idealist and phenomenological specula-tion, and simultaneously looks forward to the more literary conversations in the next section. His nuanced argument enlarges discussion by considering Schlegel, Blanchot, Mallarmé and Freud in conjunction with the poet. Specif-ically, Cohen explores the philosophical meanings and resonances across the Stevens corpus of what ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ calls ‘the

essen-tial prose’ (CPP 29). Drawing on ‘Nuances of a Theme by Williams’ and

extending its reading throughout the corpus to ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ and beyond, the chapter argues that traditional concepts of ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’ are insufficient to account for Stevens’ preoccupation with the relations between literary language and an idealist ‘thing’. As Cohen argues, ‘Paradoxically, prose can manifest itself only in the guise of a poem’. More-over, in Stevens, ‘the essential prose of “English” lives in and through the imaginative alienations of “French”’.

The second half of Part II, which is devoted to more artistic conversations, opens with Chapter 8, David Haglund’s informative ‘Stevens, Duchamp and the American “ism”, 1915–1919’. Following through on Cohen, Haglund explores Stevens’ concept of his own poetic career as represented in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’. Contrasting the gestures made by Stevens and Duchamp toward an ‘American art’ or ‘American identity’, the chapter discusses Stevens’ playful relationship with various ‘isms’ and the manifesto-aesthetics of early Modernism. For Haglund, Stevens is sceptical about an ‘Americanist’ literature and his poetic project is clearly differentiated from that of William Carlos Williams. Haglund also reads Stevens’ ‘Primordia’ and ‘Pecksniffiana’ sequences, focusing especially on ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, as instructive instances of the poet’s battle with American soil and an emergent poetic.

(27)

abstraction and argues that the examples of Picasso and Cézanne galvanized Stevens’ acceptance of the advantages of an abstract aesthetic. Focusing on significant moments in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ – a poem Ragg sug-gests ‘critiques the very abstraction it also embraces’ – the essay analyses Picasso’s effect on that poem as well as the presence of Cézanne in ‘Prelude to Objects’. The essay presents a Stevens who unashamedly turns to an abstract poetic because of its restorative human powers rather than marking a retreat

into a world of the imagination. Indeed, the paradox of anabstract

engage-ment informs the analysis of Stevens’ Transatlantic gestures throughout his career.

The chapters by Haglund and Ragg, which reconsider Stevens’ dialogue with European visual artists, are followed in turn by a chapter revisiting con-nections with a specific European writer. Lisa Goldfarb’s ‘Music and the Vocal Poetics of Stevens and Valéry’ offers a discussion of the still underappreci-ated relationship between Stevens and his French contemporary Paul Valéry. Goldfarb’s aim in Chapter 10 is to bring the vocal poetics of Valéry to a read-ing of Stevens’ work. After presentread-ing the contours of Valéry’s vocal poetics, drawing from his many essays and voluminous notebooks, Goldfarb turns to Valéryan echoes in Stevens’ prose, to highlight how his essays, letters and ‘Adagia’ call forth the shaping structure of Valéry’s more extensive theory. She ends by discussing a number of Stevens’ poems – most notably ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, ‘Variations on a Summer Day’, ‘The Creations of Sound’ and ‘Large Red Man Reading’ – to show how Stevens breathes life into their shared poetics of voice. According to Goldfarb, when we read Stevens’ work with Valéry’s theory in mind, we hear each poet’s voice more accurately and fully, and feel Valéry’s presence in Stevens’ poetic world.

Part III, ‘Getting It Straight at the Sorbonne? Stevens’ Afterlife in Europe’, opens with Mark Ford’s colourful investigation of the biographical and poetic links between Stevens and the English poet Nicholas Moore; as well as, through this connection, of Stevens’ dealings with the Fortune Press. One of the brightest young stars in the London poetry firmament of the 1940s and a widely published writer in the United States for a while, the charmingly eccentric Moore flew off the radar in the ensuing decades only to die in com-plete obscurity. Ford offers a vivid, genial and at times hilarious portrait of the man’s life and endlessly inventive work, which would bring him into con-tact with Stevens, the Modernist poet whom he admired most and actively sought to launch to a British readership. Thus Chapter 11 also tells the won-derful story of the Fortune Press and its shady founder, R. A. Caton, with cameo appearances by Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and the highly exotic Tambimuttu. It is a story that usefully reminds us of the crucial, at times volatile and unpredictable, role of ‘middle men’ in the establishment of a poet’s reputation and his ultimate canonization.

(28)

a poet who instead of insouciantly emulating his Transatlantic forebear ambivalently struggled with him. Although Tomlinson is widely regarded as one of the most ‘Americanized’ of the British poets to come to prominence in the twenty or so years following the Second World War, his relationship with American poetry, Reeves argues, is not easy to categorize. His poetry is haunted by the contradictions inherent in American poetic Modernism, summed up as the Symbolist tendencies of Stevens on the one hand and the Imagism of Williams on the other. The common view of Tomlinson, fostered by the poet himself, is that an early, mistaken allegiance to Stevens gave way to a more fruitful reading of Williams. But the picture Reeves offers is less simple and more fascinating: for one way of looking at Tomlinson’s poetic career is as an attempt to exorcize the ghost of Stevens.

If, in the case of Moore and Tomlinson, we are clearly talking of the direct influence exerted by Stevens on a younger generation of Transat-lantic poets, this is altogether different in the case study presented by Irene Ramalho Santos. Chapter 13, ‘A Poetics of Ignorance: António Ramos Rosa and Stevens’, offers the first extended investigation of the promi-nent Portuguese poet Ramos Rosa’s work in conjunction with Stevens’ aesthetics. The essay argues that rather than see Ramos Rosa as explicitly responding to Stevens (with whose poetry he claims to be only vaguely familiar), the later poet gathers inspiration from a ‘poetics of ignorance’ in which Ramos Rosa’s acquaintance with Stevens is a cannily ‘unknow-ing’ catalyst for his own work. Ramalho Santos’ suave chapter is inter-ested more in understanding what she calls ‘constellations of poets’ based on a shared aesthetic affinity and a joint resistance to poetry’s coloniza-tion by philosophy than in tracing direct intertextual genealogies. Such constellations offer extended possibilities for critical exploration, as she briefly illustrates with the further example of the Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros.

(29)

to a poem already held up for inspection by several other contributors to the volume.

While the academic chapters may thus be said to have come full circle, we are pleased to be able to append a visually attractive coda as a concluding instance of Stevens’ Transatlantic afterlife. This time, however, the crossings involved are also generic: the personal testimonial offered by Helga Kos is that of a visual artist from Amsterdam who learnt of Stevens first through the musical transposition of seven late poems by famous American com-poser (and author) Ned Rorem, to which in turn she was invited to provide a painter’s response. What was originally intended as a relatively circum-scribed, short-lived assignment ran out of hand as Kos became mesmerized by Stevens’ powerful appeal as an image-maker. The result was a happily obsessive five-year adventure that ended with a three-volume ‘artist’s book’ which we have tried to evoke, however imperfectly, through a series of colour reproductions. Ideally, however, the book itself, as Kos explains, should be experienced – like Rorem’s music – in time, thus presenting us with an appro-priate concluding image for a study of Stevens that is especially interested in the open-ended act of finding what crossings will suffice.

Works cited

Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered: An Oral Biography. New York: Random House, 1983.

Cook, Eleanor.Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Critchley, Simon.Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. London: Routledge, 2005.

Maeder, Beverly. Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute. Bas-ingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.

Michaels, Walter Benn.Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

Serio, John N. ‘Introduction: A Personal Reflection’.The Wallace Stevens Journal27.1 (Spring 2003): 3–6.

Stevens, Wallace.Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Stevens, Wallace.Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson.

(30)

Part I

(31)

(32)

1

‘The Switzerland of the Mind’:

Stevens’ Invention of Europe

George Lensing

Why did Stevens, loving Europe as he did, never visit there? And what did it mean to him as a poet that he didn’t? We know that as early as 1923, Stevens and his wife were able to make a leisurely sea voyage through the Panama Canal, and, on other occasions, he went on to vacation in places like Florida and Maine. He also made a couple of brief visits to Cuba. Eventually, he had the means financially to make a journey across the Atlantic, even as he was able to and did purchase paintings from an art dealer in Paris, carvings and jewellery from Ceylon, and other artefacts from other countries. To the poet for whom ‘life is an affair of places’ instead of ‘people’ (CPP901), one might expect a visit to Europe to beckon him commandingly.

In addressing these questions, I want first to outline the passion for Europe that Stevens indulged throughout his adult lifetime in correspondence, note-books and poetry. Secondly, one can only speculate that, at some point in his middle age, perhaps earlier, he realized that it was unlikely he would ever visit Europe or any of the other distant continents. That being the case, he proceeded to explore ways in which he could bring Europe to himself in intimately personal ways and in ways that would have important con-sequences for his poetry. Two entries in one of his working notebooks ably serve as illustrations of important premises that became part of Stevens’ larger poetics: ‘Poetry As The Switzerland Of The Mind’ and ‘The Alp at the end of

the street’ (FPof P184 and 167). In the end, Europe wasonlya ‘Switzerland

Of TheMind’ or an ‘Alp at the end of [his] street’ – an intrinsically different Europe, but a construct of immense and enduring importance and pleasure to the poet – a unique description without place. The final entry in the same notebook entitled ‘From Pieces of Paper’ is ‘One Must Sit Still To Discover The World’ (FPof P188).

We know that during his three years at Harvard, Stevens studied French and German languages and literature, as well as British literature. These, in fact, made up the core of his curriculum there. He majored, one might say, in European languages and literature. Later, in one of his ‘Adagia’, he would affirm that ‘French and English constitute a single language’ (CPP914). Then,

(33)

at the age of 20, resolving to leave the university without completing a degree, Stevens confided in his journal his plans for the future: ‘I am going to New York, I think, to try my hand at journalism. If that does not pan out well, I am resolved to knock about the country – the world’ (SP70). After beginning his tenure as a reporter at the New YorkTribune, he was dreaming just a few months later, ‘I hope to get to Paris next summer – and I mean to if I have the

money’ (SP90), and, back in New York having spent Christmas in Reading, he

had not abandoned his plan: ‘I am likely to remain here until Spring, at least. Europe is still on the other side of the ocean’ (SP94). Because of straitened financial circumstances in the ensuing months and years, it remained on the other side of the ocean.

In 1904, Elsie Kachel entered his life, though the two were not wed until 1909. In one letter to her during the engagement, he indulged again in his dream:

Bernard Shaw has just brought out a new thing in London called ‘The Admirable Bashville.’ There is no scenery and the actors act in their every-day clothes. It is a burlesque of Shakespeare, I believe. – Wouldn’t it be nice to live in London and go – say, on Saturday evening? We’ll be going over there one of these days, I hope. – I should mope in Paradise (possibly) if I were to die without first having been to London. – On Sunday, it was Berlin. – I have had my hours for Paris, too. – When I could see the Street of Little Stables, and the Street of Beautiful Leaves, and the Bridge of Arts, and the Church of Our Lady, and the Arch of Triumph – as clearly as I can see you looking out of that frame. – Good Fortune, send us to them all. We’ll save for that. It isn’t so impossibly expensive, you know. People who

go once go often....It seems much nearer, too, when the steamers start

from the foot of your own street, as they do here.

(CS141)

It is noteworthy that Stevens has already visited these locations mentally – last Sunday in Berlin and ‘I have had my hours for Paris, too’. His letter speaks of a certain familiarity with Paris, resulting, we might speculate, from his reading, photographs or, more likely, his own interior constructions. But those interior visitations still anticipate the real London, the real Berlin, the real Paris. ‘We’ll be going over there one of these days, I hope’, and with something like adolescent plangency: ‘I should mope in Paradise (possibly) if I were to die without first having been to London.’

Six months later, his longing for London was unabated as he noted in his journal: ‘London continues to be the ultimate point of romance to me.

I wish there was some chap there to whom I could write for things’ (CS141).

(34)

‘things’. He had thereby discovered a strategy that would remain intact for the remainder of his life. By the time his poem ‘Autumn Refrain’ appeared in 1932, the music of the European nightingale with all its Keatsian evocations had become purely imaginary: ‘Though I have never – shall never hear that bird’ (CPP129).

At the age of 54, he mentioned in a letter, ‘For my part, I never really lived until I had a home, and my own room, say, with a package of books from

Paris or London’ (L301). The letter to James Powers is noteworthy because

it establishes the terms of a certain compromise Stevens has made. First he needs the security of his own home and the privacy of his own room as a condition for enjoying the package of books. Europe, so to speak, has become domestic and solitary. Lacking all these circumstances, he explains, he ‘never really lived’.

For some reason, and this is an anomaly in Stevens’ responses to Europe, he found in 1951 a visitor from Sweden irksome:

On Saturday, a visitor from Sweden, a very pleasant and intelligent person, came to the house. We had an agreeable talk. He was well mannered, but he reeked of tobacco smoke. He also reeked of Swedish poetry and when he finished his call he left with me a book of Swedish songs with their scores and, in addition, an anthology of Swedish poetry translated into English. Now, I have not the slightest desire to sing Swedish songs correctly or incorrectly and at the moment a Swedish anthology is the last thing in the world that I should ever look at. This is simply typical of the sort of thing that runs one ragged.

(L712)

It must have been at this time that he entered into his notebook of proposed titles the following: ‘Shrinking From Sweden’ (FPofP171).

Switzerland, on the other hand, held out a greater appeal. To José Rodríguez Feo he wrote in 1948, ‘But, suddenly, I began to think about Switzerland. There is a great deal coming from Switzerland. Then, too, Switzerland is something that one ought to think about in the summertime. It is so much more agreeable to think about Lake Geneva at this time of the year than it is to think about the rue de Babylone, nicht wahr?’ (L594). Two years later, he was still thinking of that country, saying to Bernard Heringman, ‘I assume that you will see something of Switzerland, which has been everywhere in

my mind recently’ (L665). In the notebook of titles, he wrote out ‘Poetry

As The Switzerland Of The Mind’, ‘A Sudden Importance of Switzerland’ and ‘Swiss Widow’ (FPof P184, 185, 178).

(35)

poems by McGreevy, who was Director of the National Gallery in Dublin and whom Stevens knew almost solely by correspondence. McGreevy’s poems recollect his youth in the town of Tarbert near Mal Bay, locations that are prominently drawn into Stevens’ poem. Another postcard with a photograph of the Irish Cliffs of Moher in County Clare came from the director of the Lamont Library poetry room at Harvard, John Sweeney, who was vacationing there. In a later letter, Stevens acknowledged that the photograph

‘eventu-ally became a poem’ (L770), the one called ‘The Irish Cliffs of Moher’. On

yet another occasion, Stevens was also quite taken with the account written by his lively Cuban correspondent José Rodríguez Feo about an Argentine writer who suffered through a bitterly cold Parisian winter. That story led to Rodríguez Feo’s decision to decline the offer of a job with UNESCO in Paris. Here is Rodríguez Feo’s letter:

I gave up the job at the Unesco at Paris because mother was afraid I would freeze in the Parisian hotels. She happened to listen in on a conversa-tion wherein a friend of mine described in gruesome details the fate of an Argentine writer. At night he would go to bed, cover himself with blankets – protruding from the pile of wool a hand, in a black glove, holds a novel by Camus. That was the only safe way he could keep in touch with French literary events. Mother was much impressed by the picture of the engloved hand holding a trembling little volume. She begged me to stay away.

(L617)

This episode of the Parisian winter and the Argentine writer was made into Stevens’ poem ‘The Novel’, coming, as he later told Rodríguez Feo, ‘from one of your letters to me’ (L687).

In the spring and summer of 1949, Stevens was writing ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ and, in canto XXVIII, he incorporated several letters and postcards from friends in Europe. Here is the first part of the canto:

If it should be true that reality exists

In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it, The long-bladed knife, the little to drink and her

Misericordia, it follows that

Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven Before and after one arrives or, say,

Bergamo on a postcard, Rome after dark, Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes Or Paris in conversation at a café.

(36)

Many years ago, while doing archival research at the Huntington Library, I discovered the sources for these references. ‘Rome after dark’ had come from a recent postcard sent by McGreevy describing his nights in Rome. Stevens responded, ‘Your postcard from Rome set me up. Rome is not ordinarily on the itinerary of my imagination. It is a little out of the way, covered by cypresses. It is not a place that one visits frequently like Paris or Dublin’

(L629). ‘Sweden described’ (the country toward which his sympathies had

apparently softened) came from a woman named Ebba Dalin, an American married to a Swedish-American engineer; she had sent several pictures of Stockholm with an invitation to visit. More recently, Barbara Church, widow of Stevens’ friend Henry Church, sent him a succession of postcards and notes throughout the summer of 1949, including a postcard from Stockholm in June. She also provided the description of ‘Paris in conversation at a café’ after her visit there in July. ‘Bergamo on a postcard’ also came from Mrs Church later that month.

In retrospect, one can appreciate the importance of these hastily scrawled messages that made their way through the mails to Hartford. Here is a kind of vicarious identity with the poet’s friends and their travels; the notes and cards personalized for him a connection to European cities otherwise left to his imagination. In the late summer of 1950, for example, he wrote to Mrs Church that he had ‘looked forward to a particularly busy summer run-ning around all over Europe (in other people’s shoes) because there are quite

a number of people over there this summer’ (L689). Three summers later

he wrote to her again, ‘The postcards from Ville d’Avray came the other day. They did me a lot of good. In fact, I survive on postcards from Europe’ (L797).

Stevens also survived on postcards and other items from Europe by merging an image of remote cities and lands with the immediacy of his own familiar surroundings. In this way, the foreign and the familiar came to depend upon each other, at times evoking a form of creative tension and at other times a harmonious convergence. A purely Stevensian comparison between Hay-den mangoes on his table at Hartford and a description of ‘blue and white Munich’ three years after the bombings of that city in the Second World War came together for Stevens as a result of a letter from Mrs Church in the German city:

(37)

position to carry on the struggle with and against reality and against the fifth column of reality that keeps whispering with the hard superiority of the sane that reality is all we have, that it is that or nothing. Reality is the footing from which we leap after what we do not have and on which everything depends.

(L599–600)

This remarkable letter makes clear that Stevens lived his poetics of the imagination in his own domestic, quotidian life brightened with something as casual as a reference to the recently bombed city of Munich as ‘blue and white’.

On another occasion some newspaper wrappings from Paris containing photographs of the city of Aix-en-Provence conjured in his inner ear the sound of a fountain. Such sounds then merged with the cooing of a dove he had encountered walking to the office:

Some books came recently wrapped in a Paris newspaper which contained photos of some fountains at Aix, not great things, but enough to make a little sound as one walked by. This makes me think of a little dove that was sitting high upon a wire near home a few mornings ago cooing about nothing much. I stopped to look at her. She turned around so that she could see me better but went right on with her talk.

(L610)

The convergences of ‘blue and white Munich’ with the Hayden mangoes on the table and the photos of the ‘fountains at Aix’ with the cooing dove in Hartford display the kinds of syntheses by which Stevens constructed many of his poems. More specifically, they show how Europe had become the richly evocative and constant landscape of his imagination directly attached to the immediate world as he knew it.

Stevens’ correspondence, providing him with readymateria poeticafrom

(38)

‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’ is a highly sensuous poem about the pleasures deriving from the sight, smell, feel and taste of peaches in their rich summer ripeness. ‘With my whole body I taste these peaches, / I touch them and

smell them’ (CPP206), the poem begins. But the peaches are not just any

peaches; their satisfactions relate in a peculiar way to one’s native origins, one’s identity with one’s native land. The speaker in the poem, a Russian, delights in the peaches the way that ‘the Angevine / Absorbs Anjou’, the way ‘the black Spaniard plays his guitar’. His delight is partially but not completely successful. In the end, he is, in fact, an alien among the peaches: ‘But it must be that I, / That animal, that Russian, that exile, for whom // The bells of the chapel pullulate sounds at / Heart.’ At the same time, the exiled Russian finds the peaches ‘full of the colors of my village / And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace’. But peace is not his at the end of the poem. He emerges finally as a divided self. These peaches are like Russian peaches; even the title declares ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’. But the ‘peace’ of the Russian’s homeland gives way to the ‘ferocities’ of his exile, perhaps in Anjou itself or Spain. Here is how the poem concludes, a sharp reversal:

Even the drifting of the curtains,

Slight as it is, disturbs me. I did not know

That such ferocities could tear

One self from another, as these peaches do.

One self is divided from the other – a RussianofRussia and a Russian in

exilefromRussia – even though the peaches themselves almost allow him to

escape such painful division.

The poem perhaps has a bearing upon the issue of Stevens’ relation to Europe. It is a poem about a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a Russian. The first two are one with their native origins. The third, the Russian, is an exile. Among other possible readings, I want to suggest that the Russian is related to a Stevens who himself remained exiled from absorbing Anjou like an Angevine, or, for that matter, like an American. The Russian exile is an exile in Europe; Stevens is an exile from Europe. Such ‘ferocities’ of separa-tion for Stevens also came at a personal cost, a sense of loss, a divided self, a hunger for the peaches of Europe that remained the forbidden fruit of a distant land.

(39)

When he was beginning to write his poem ‘Description Without Place’, Stevens wrote to Henry Church, a wealthy editor and sponsor of the arts who lived as much in France as in the United States (in some ways a kind of Stevens alter ego): ‘I have only one piece of news, and that is that I am going to read a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard next June [1945]. I am

about to settle down to my subject: DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE....It

seems to me to be an interesting idea: that is to say, the idea that we live in the description of a place and not in the place itself, and in every vital sense we do. This ought to be a good subject for such an occasion’ (L494).

If our knowledge of the world is always its seeming, we are always, like the Russian in ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’, exiles from that world. If, in the words of ‘A Collect of Philosophy’, ‘we never see the world except the

moment after’ (CPP857), then the separation of the eye from its object can

be distanced by a few inches or by the Atlantic Ocean itself. Europe, like all other objects, is necessarily the seeming of it. I believe this is what Stevens is saying in the final canto of ‘Description Without Place’. Here, thinking of Spain, he speaks of ‘The invention of a nation in a phrase’, as if by the act of naming he created it. After acknowledging that ‘the word is the making of the world’, he presents the Spanish hidalgo:

the hard hidalgo Lives in the mountainous character of his speech;

And in that mountainous mirror Spain acquires The knowledge of Spain and of the hidalgo’s hat –

A seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life, The invention of a nation in a phrase.

(CPP302)

In ‘The World as Meditation’, Penelope’s passionate longing for the return of Ulysses yields to her mind his visionary presence in the motions of the sun.

‘It was Ulysses and it was not’ (CPP442), the poem concludes. And so it is

with Stevens’ lifelong romance with Europe. The presence of that continent, and the many countries that perpetually fascinated him, was and was not. The seeming of Europe was his seeing of it.